The numbers in Robert Rapier’s recent Keystone XL post are spot on. It’s true that the 170 billion barrels found in the Athabasca tar sands reserve alone won’t cook the planet, just as it’s true that one Big Mac won’t make you fat and one cigarette won’t give you cancer. That’s not encouragement for you to go buy a pack of Marlboros. That’s just a fact.

Rapier’s numbers on coal’s destructive spread to the Asia Pacific region are spot on, too. There’s no arguing against the idea that campaigns on the scale of Keystone XL against coal are needed. Fortunately for us, we have them. Look at just one: Sierra Club and Michael Bloomberg have teamed up to spend a budget that dwarfs any directed at pipeline fights, and they have the victories to show for it. With any luck their model will serve as a learning experience for campaigners working to limit coal’s spread around the globe.

Rapier also argues that the coal should receive more attention than tar sands development since the “biggest threat should have the biggest focus.” Threat is a matter of perspective, and that’s what I’d like to concentrate on here.

For front-line communities, the threat posed by tar sands development isn’t just the 0.03C degree temperature rise that researchers have found would occur if the full volume of “economically viable proven reserves” of tar sands in Canada are developed. No, the threat is found in the poison that washes downstream everyday to their businesses, religious centers, and homes. Cancer rates in some places, like in the Fort Chipewyan community, located about 200 km down stream from the epicenter of tar sands extraction, are up 30 percent, an undersold story that’s a tragedy unfolding right before our eyes.

In towns where trains carrying tar sands crude rumble through late at night, their threat comes in the form of exploding rail cars. The people of Lac Megantic, Quebec know all about this, after they experienced a derailment of 74 cars carrying crude oil last summer, killing 50. By now we know that the oil industry is betting big on rail if pipelines are denied. If they get their wish, more towns, sadly, may have to have the experiences of the people of Lac Megantic, a tragedy in the making.

And for people that live around refineries, their threat can be felt every day in their lungs and on their skin. Take Port Arthur, TX, where Shell and Valero refineries have led to high cancer rates, asthma rates, and other adverse health effects. One study showed that residents were four times more likely to report heart and respiratory conditions than people just 100 miles away.

There’s another threat that’s worth examining, this one a bit more abstract. That’s the political threat felt by politicians who look for any excuse not to speed the transition off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Some politicians may not understand the scientific logic of action, but trust me when I tell you that they understand the political logic of inaction if it affects the two things they care most about—money and votes.

Keystone XL has rallied millions to the cause of limiting fossil fuel development and acting on climate change. I was a part of an effort that collected over 800,000 comments into the Senate on Keystone XL in 24 hours. I was also an organizer for the rally that brought 50,000 people to Obama’s house—in February no less—to convince him to act on climate and reject Keystone XL.

Any political operative will tell you that intensity is what wins in politics. That’s why the Tea Party rose--for better or worse, and let's go with worse--to national notoriety when it started yelling at public officials about made up conspiracies like our president’s “true” birthplace and Agenda 21.

It’s this sort of intensity that must be leveraged for climate action—in the streets, online, and in the voting booth. And it is being leveraged, not just on Keystone XL, but on a hundred different fronts. I honestly don’t know how pundits and so-called experts can say that the environmental community has a single-minded focus on Keystone XL. Look at the websites and budgets of the Big Greens. Most of the money is not being spent on KXL. If that is where the passion is right now, then so be it. You cannot control social movements.

At a time when we have one of the worst performing Congresses in history, the import of the president’s decision on Keystone XL carries huge symbolic weight. That’s the this-is-a-fork-in-the-road argument for rejection, the battle over symbols in politics. But as we’ve seen, for people on the front lines, symbols are secondary. Ending the destructive role of fossil fuels in their communities is the primary concern. That’s a fight worth fighting.

Daniel Kessler works with Citizen Engagement Lab'sClimate Lab. He previously was with 350.org and Greenpeace International. He is a graduate of the University of Wyoming and calls Oakland, aka the Sunny Side, home.

This paragraph sounds like a very good argument for building the pipeline:

"In towns where trains carrying tar sands crude rumble through late at night, their threat comes in the form of exploding rail cars..."

I agree with everything you say about the damage caused by extracting the oil from the Athabasca sands. So, if it were possible to stop that extraction, that would be a "good thing."

Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. Hoping that not building the pipeline will somehow stop production is fantasy. Blocking the pipeline might "send a message," but unfortunately the atomsphere does not care that a particular tonne of CO2 was emitted despite my strong protest (or yours).

In the meantime, not building the pipeline will mean that a lot of this stuff will be tranported by rail, which is more dangerous to human life than either the extraction or combustion of the oil.

My point is this: if you are going to allow production of this stuff, it is best to build the pipeline.

1. Are you saying thus that the US should refuse shipments of oil from Canada? Even if it did, what is to stop Canada to continue extraction? Keystone protests have been so focused on the pipeline that they have had little impact on trying to get these 'dirty' processes better or stopped and in any case US public sentiment is hardly going to sway Canadian policy.

2. "In towns where trains carrying tar sands crude rumble through late at night, their threat comes in the form of exploding rail cars." Surely this is a perfect example of why keystone should be built? Canadian oil exports into the US are not going to stop overnight.

3. "At a time when we have one of the worst performing Congresses in history, the import of the president’s decision on Keystone XL carries huge symbolic weight."Maybe it does have symbolic weight. But what about actual actions rather than symbols? Roberts position is essentially summed up in a comment i made on his website in that the protestors are spending 23 hours on keystone and only 1 hour on coal. Keystone is on of the UK Guardians main environmental stories.

4. “But as we’ve seen, for people on the front lines, symbols are secondary.” Ah so the symbols that are so important are now unimportant?

5. “Ending the destructive role of fossil fuels in their communities is the primary concern.” This is naive. One consequence of ending fossil fuels means a radical change to transport and logistics to which we have no proven alternative. Also items like cement and steel would have a hard time being produced without their carbon sources.

Yes, activist epidemiology. As a scientist I continue to despair at the attitude environmentalists have to such things compared with the science of climate change.

What does this report about this "30% increase in cancer" actually say? Well, here is a quote:

"one cannot rule out the possibility that increases were due to chance or that they were a result of increased detection or increased risk."

In other words the results are very inconclusive, but this obviously is of little concern to people who wish to scaremonger. Acting as if the results are conclusive seems to display irresponsibility on your part.

Activists should learn to be less slapdash with the truth. Otherwise your opponents can use this against you.

And proponents should be less ready to be slapdash in their use of "it's not proven as an absolute so we can ignore the likelyhood that it's real" argument. Not acting to prevent "likely" detrimental effects and waiting for the problem to be full blown is irresponsible! Old addage, ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure!

Aside from wondering why you feel compelled to respond to every comment on Dan's post, I'll point out that you have inadvertently offered a fine reason to accept Keystone: Petroleum is in fact the indispensible "current tool" for energizing the global economy during its lengthy transition to cleaner energy.

1) Because those that don't speak up deserve what they get, why are you so interested in promoting apathy? and 2) you're logic in coming to that conclusion is faulty beyond measure. That TAR won't go towards creating clean technologies but will be used as an excuse to develop more tech to get at the currently unrecoverable oil thereby making our energy mix even dirtier.